


never so adored you

by 8sword



Category: Captain America (Movies), Supernatural
Genre: Crossover Pairings, Hurt/Comfort, Letters, M/M, Post-Avengers (2012), Stanford Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 07:42:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2539838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8sword/pseuds/8sword
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I'm hungry," Steve says honestly. "Looks like you are, too."</p>
            </blockquote>





	never so adored you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [orange_8_hands](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_8_hands/gifts).



> orange, you were getting this anyway, but I really, really wanted to say thank you for all the work you put into helping me with my big bang and all the encouragement you gave me and continue to give me and I JUST REALLY APPRECIATE YOU, OKAY?
> 
> (Title from Panic! At The Disco's "Far Too Young to Die.")

After New York, Steve starts getting invitations to speak. At public functions, at dedications, at universities. He avoids most of them, except a few memorials at places that were hit hardest during the Chitauri attack, where men and women lost their lives trying to protect others, but even then he feels like a fraud, somehow. What right does he have to stand there and speak as some sort of authority when he knows no more, and maybe even less, than the people who are no longer there with them?

One day, though. One day an invitation comes from a pre-law club at Stanford University, whose social chair has written asking Captain Steve Rogers if he would be willing to speak on health care reform.

This social chair is none other than Sam Winchester, who knows that the chances of _Captain America_ coming to talk at their junior law club gathering with its small student council-allotted budget is about as good as his chances of convincing Dean to stop hunting. But he's always been secretly fascinated by Captain America, watching all those documentaries about the captain and Bucky Barnes in motel rooms while he was growing up and nothing else was on. Sam always focused on Steve Rogers' childhood more than his war career, even though it was all his war exploits that excited Dean, that had made Dean settle on watching the first Captain America documentary they saw in the first place, while they were both sniffling with the flu, surrounded by used cheap Puffs tissues in their shared motel bed as skinny kids. Sam liked hearing about how Steve was so sick growing up, such an underdog that no one thought would make it, would _be_ anything, and sometimes on the playground when he was getting picked on for his clothes or his stained backpack or nothing at all except being the new kid, he pretended he was Steve Rogers, and he'd be big someday, and they'd all see then--

In the meantime, there was his big brother to barrel onto the playground when he was getting kicked on, to holler, "I'm gonna rip your lungs out!" at the kids who pushed him, and walk him home every afternoon, fussing over his skinned knees.

Steve's first instinct is to set the invitation aside with the others. But there's something earnest in the letter the kid writes him--even the fact that it's a letter, not an e-mail printed out by the SHIELD secretary in charge of screening his mail, makes him give it a second glance. He sits for a moment in the too-cushy chair provided for him to sit in while he riffles through his mail at the Triskelion every week. He doesn't think of how jealous he is, that even now in his current position, there are others who get to go to college, while he is still…

He curls his hands. Straightens them back out, feeling the tense give of the leather gloves around his fingers.

These hands drew things, once.

He dials the number written beneath Sam Winchester's scrawled signature.

 

He drives to California himself, a cross-country trip on his bike. Fury's not happy about it, nor Hill, nor even Stark, who keeps trying to push technology and first-class plane trips onto him, but it makes Steve feel a little bit more in control, being able to drive himself places, instead of being chivvied onto aircraft and taken to destinations in which he has no say.  It's an adjustment; the same weird, half-guilty, half-weightless feeling of being on furlough, only he's never been on it without Bucky before. And the wide empty road is big enough for that pain, the grief that billows out and whips and flaps behind him like a scarf, a noose flapping from his neck because he shouldn't be here when Bucky's not.

He gets there, and they have a hotel room ready for him--when the Stanford administration got wind of a celebrity like Steve Rogers coming, more funding was diverted from the student fees that were set aside for other speaking engagements, enough to cover a ritzy hotel room and a catered dinner after the talk, since the Captain wasn't charging a fee for his engagement the way the guest speaker comedians and politicians and actors and actresses did. It's not what Steve expects, really, and not what he would have liked, either, but he's used to playing nice, after his months on tour with the U.S.O., so he smiles, and nods, and smiles, and nods, and thanks people, until he finally gets to the auditorium where he'll be speaking, and is greeted by a lanky boy as tall as himself, in a slightly-too-big blazer and a pair of khakis that don't quite match. He has a mop of brown hair nearly as enthusiastic as the smile he gives Steve, shy and exuberant and grateful.

"I--you probably hear this all the time," he says. "But you were my hero growing up. Seriously. The challenges you faced--"

"Thank you, Sam," Steve says, and the kid lights up, if possible, even further, and falls into thanking him again for agreeing to come, and right in the middle of telling him the refreshments they have waiting for him in one of the back rooms, his phone goes off.

"Oh God," the kid says. "I'm so sorry, I--"

But he doesn't turn it off. He says, "I'm so sorry, seriously--I will be right back--" and darts around some lighting equipment, deeper into the darkness of backstage.

Steve clears his throat, uncomfortably, and shifts slightly to look out at the stage with its drawn curtains and passing-by crew members. He can hear Sam's phone conversation, tries to scuff his feet on the wood to block it from his enhanced hearing, but hears, "Dean? Is this an emergency?" anyway.

"Not unless you count my birthday as an emergency," says the voice on the phone, made slightly tinny by the small speaker. It's a man, his voice slurring slightly. "C'mon, little brother, you gonna sing to me or what?"

A huff. "Happy birthday, Dean," Sam says, not insincerely. "Look, I've gotta call you back, though--I'm kind of in the middle of something."

A pause. "Oh. Yeah, sure."

"I'll call you back," Sam says hurriedly. "Bye, Dean."

Steve moves out of the way just as Sam barrels back out of the wings. "Sorry!" he says breathlessly. "I just--my brother, he's--" He waves a hand. "I thought it might be an emergency. Sorry. Here, let me show you…"

 

So Steve does his speaking thing, to a crowded auditorium that's standing room only, and then goes to the catered dinner afterward that's mostly attended by well-dressed donors and university officials who have never had to worry about how to afford health care in their lives, but Sam's there, too, at least, vibrating in excitement, only slightly awkward in his secondhand cobbled-together suit amid the expensive business wear around him, and Steve talks to him as much as he can, he and several of his classmates who spend more time talking than listening, which is easier, in its way.

Afterward, he checks out of the hotel room booked for him, thanking the concierge, and heads back onto the road in his khakis and leather jacket. It's not so late, maybe eleven or so, and after only half an hour on the near-empty Tuesday night roads, his stomach's beginning to growl, unsatisfied by the light, fancy foods served at the dinner.

He stops at the first bar-like restaurant he sees, pulling into the parking lot next to a gleaming black car.  He goes inside and up to the bar and orders a burger, side of fries, thanks. Turns, leaning against the bar as he waits, looking idly across the room as he slides his wallet back into his pocket, and takes in the people kids laughing loudly in booths, the men slowly circling the pool tables in the corner. He's turning back to examine the black and white photos hanging on the wall behind the bar when a voice behind him snags on his memory.

"Shoulda woulda coulda, pal," it's saying, and Steve turns to see a man in an over-sized leather jacket waving a handful of bills at a much larger man on the other side of the pool table before sliding it into his pocket. "Better luck next time."

It's the voice that said _Not unless you count my birthday as an emergency_. It sounds more slurred than before, and Steve studies the face it belongs to for a minute longer before looking at the other guy on the opposite side of the pool table, whose face wears a look Steve knows well, saw it enough times in alleyways and behind diners right before he got punched.

"Hey," Steve says, just loud enough to be heard, pushing away from the bar. "Let me play a round."

Both men's attentions are pulled to him. Steve hooks his thumbs in his khaki pockets unthreateningly, glancing up just as guilelessly from beneath the bill of his cap.

Sam's brother takes him in from the toes up, a measuring glance that's as liquid and lazy as it is careful. "Heya, big guy." His voice is languid, almost flirtatious, and Steve recognizes it like an ache in his bones, like cold in his teeth. Bucky used to come home like this, the nights he'd flop down on Steve's bed, next to him, leg slung across Steve's over the covers and tell him, _I fuckin' love you, man. You know that?_ before falling asleep and waking the next morning with no recollection of what he'd said.

"Hey," Steve says back, and if his voice comes out taut, it's only him that notices it. He clears his throat. "How much?"

"For you?" Sam's brother says. There's something a little more like a shark's edge to his smile now, despite the smell of alcohol that emanates from him. "Baby, I'm free."

Steve's eyes flick back to the large man. He's turned away, is muttering something to another man sitting at a booth. Steve flexes his fingers, once, and moves to take a cue.

Sam's brother's, _Dean's_ , eyes follow him, dark and gleaming under the buttery lamplight, long shadows cast across his face. It's warm in the bar, but neither he nor Steve remove their jackets.

Dean has to shake his arms out when he bends to make shots, the leather coat sleeves hanging over his knuckles otherwise. Steve studies him without trying to look like he's studying him, and senses at the same time that Dean is positioning himself to be studied, leaning with the same exhibitionist's grace Bucky always had, like he glowed brighter under someone's gaze.

He watches Dean with the same quiet intensity he used for studying Hydra maps in his dark green dress uniform, with the same occasional brief, downward smiles that Bucky teased out of him at pubs and campfire across Europe, after Azzano. He watches, and the server at the bar has to call to him twice that his food is ready before he hears her. He startles from his study of Dean, and Dean smirks down his cue at the striped ball in front of its pocket, and Steve flushes as he goes to the bar to retrieve his basket of fries and burger with an apologetic smile.

"Plannin' to share?" Dean says when he gets back to the table. He has a half-empty bottle of beer at his lips, is eyeing Steve's food speculatively from above it with his daring eyes.

Steve feels out of his depth. "Sure." He looks around so he won't have to meet the sly eyes, the back of his neck still hot. "We'll lose our game, though."

"Leave it." Dean places both their cues on the wall. "I got something more fun in mind."

Steve looks around again, and sets the basket and his own drink at an empty booth. Then he heads back to the bar to order some more fries. On the way back to the booth, he scans the room at large again, taking in the two men at the booth a few feet away, who are still watching Dean where he sits sprawled lazily with Steve's fries. He sits with one knee tucked against the back of the booth for him to sling his arm over as he watches Steve come back.

"You didn't hafta do that," he says.

Steve slides into the opposite side of the booth. It puts his back to the men. "What? Order more food?"

"Get more fries."

"I'm hungry," Steve says honestly. "Looks like you are, too."

Dean tucks a shoestring fry into the corner of his mouth and grins around it. Keeps eye contact with Steve as he pulls the rest of it between his lips with his tongue.

Steve smiles, eyes sliding down to the tabletop. He plays with a quarter in his fingers for a minute.

A hand slides across the table into his field of vision. The fingers are calloused and strong, a silver ring gleaming on one. "What say we get out of here?"

Steve looks up, meeting Dean's inviting smile. "We haven't even--"

Dean shifts his beer bottle on the table top. Steve's eyes fall to it, automatically, and in the brown glass he sees the reflection of the men from the other booth, standing up.

"Right," he hears himself say. He stands up, and it's already jangling in his bones, the anticipation of a fight. He rolls his shoulders under his jacket, moving to place himself between Dean and the men. A voice in the back of his head, is reminding him of something about power, and the misuse of it, and he can hear Dr. Erskine's voice, not words but just the rumble of his tone, the warmth and the accent and the kindness, and he tells himself _only if they hit first_.

It's more a promise than a warning.

Dean leans against him as they push out the door. He says something low against the bottom of Steve's jaw, breath beer-sour, and Steve's hand comes up to the small of his back as they circumvent a pothole in the asphalt, toward Steve's motorcycle and the big black car gleaming beside it, and that's when the hand grabs the back of Steve's jacket and hauls him around.

Dean moves with a speed Steve hasn't seen since--gosh, Peggy, practically, and the right hook she gave Hodge in basic. Suddenly the man who didn't grab Steve has blood gushing from his nose, and Dean's grinning, loose and happy, as the man behind Steve growls angrily and shoves forward. Too late, Steve notices the brass knuckles gleaming on his hand, but Dean ducks them and thrusts the heel of his hand right under the man's chin, slamming his head back and making him stagger, stumbling back.

"Fucking--fag," he spits. Blood dribbles from his mouth, and he spits out something, a tooth.

Dean's not smiling anymore. He punches the man again, and then gets a fistful of his hair and yanks his head down, slams his knee up into his face. The man crumples to the ground on one knee, water splashing up from the pothole, and Steve's not jangling for a fight anymore, except for how he kind of is, a sick little thrill buzzing along the edges of the horror he feels at the carnage he's just allowed to happen.

Dean shakes his fist out. The silver ring winks in the poor neon light from the bar windows. "Sorry about the assholes."

Steve shakes his head slowly. It takes him a minute to settle on what to say, which is "You do this sort of thing often?"

"Only on special occasions," Dean says with a sarcasm that edges on bitterness, and Steve studies him.

"I see."

Dean flashes a smile. "Oh yeah?" He unlocks the driver's door of the big black car next to Steve's. "You wanna make it even special-er?"

Steve raises a brow at the word. Then at the fact that Dean's getting in the driver's seat. "You've been drinking," he says pointedly.

"Four beers," Dean says. He holds up three fingers. "And…two shots, maybe."

Steve gives him an even more skeptical look. Then, on an impulse he doesn't think too much about, he rounds the front of the car and squeezes himself into the driver's side, forcing Dean to move over. "Keys."

Dean seems taken aback for a minute. Then, with a grin Steve can only describe as lecherous, he slides across the leather seat, slouching down until his knees are spread wide, one knocking against Steve's knuckles on the gearshift.

Steve moves his hands to the key in the ignition. He starts the car, doesn't miss the way Dean's head tips back against the seat as the car vibrates to life beneath them. "Where am I taking you?"

"Wherever you want."

"Are you staying somewhere?" Steve says. "On campus?"

An expression filters across Dean's face too quickly to be read. He starts giving directions instead, and Steve follows them, wondering if they're going to end up at Sam Winchester's apartment, how he will explain this situation to both of them, to either of them. Maybe it would be better just to leave once they get there and he's parked Dean's car for him, Steve is thinking when the buzz of a cellular phone fills the closed-in quiet of the car.

Dean reaches immediately for his pocket even though Steve's pretty sure the vibration came from inside his own pocket, against his hip. Sure enough, when Dean pulls out his phone to flip it open, the suddenly hopeful look on his face falls back into an unreadable one, and he flips it shut and pushes it back into his coat.

They pull into a seedy-looking motel. Dean directs Steve to a spot in front of Room 12 and gets out. Steve does, too, hesitating after he locks the car and hands Dean the keys. Dean doesn't seem to notice his discomfiture, going straight to the blue-painted door and unlocking it, opening it with a shoulder to the wood. He doesn’t close the door behind him, and after another minute of glancing up and down the dark road, Steve follows him inside.

The room's dark except for a sudden little orange flame that appears with the click of a lighter. With his enhanced vision, Steve can see Dean cupping his hand over a cigarette. It starts to glow orange, and the lighter clicks shut. Dean takes a slow, long drag in the dark, a darker silhouette around the orange glow of the cigarette.

Steve walks around the two twin beds to where he can make out the bathroom counter and a light switch there. He turns it on and turns back to face Dean. Dean blinks slightly in the harsh white light. Then he sits down on the edge of the bed he's standing in front of, only to stand back up and tug a package from underneath him. He tosses it across the room. It lands on the bare dresser and skids off of it onto the cheap carpet. Steve bends to pick it up; it's a flattened package of chocolate cupcakes that says _Hostess_ on the wrapping.

Steve catches his tongue between his teeth. He looks up at Dean, who's taking another drag from the cigarette, staring at the comforter of the other bed. His phone is in his free hand, suddenly, Dean's thumb flipping and unflipping it restlessly as he stares into space, and Steve watches him. The same way he watched Bucky sometimes, through swelling-shut eyes, wondering what was missing inside Bucky that he always came back to Steve, that he wasted his time on him when he could have so much better.

 _How are you broken_ , he used to wonder; what was the piece that the world had broken inside of Bucky that left him thinking he was low enough to consort with someone like Steve.

 _How are you broken_ , he thinks now, watching Dean open and shut his cell phone but not use it, not call his brother, just sit in this dirty motel room with a package of convenience store cupcakes in the dark on his birthday, with a man he doesn't know from Adam.

He turns the cupcakes over in his hands. "Happy birthday," he says lamely.

Dean's shoulders go stiff.

Steve realizes his mistake at once. "It's not what you think." He holds up his hands, the cupcakes falling back onto the floor. "I heard you talking to your brother on the phone."

Dean doesn't look any less predatory, his eyes piercing. The cigarette is in the ash tray on the nightstand now, smoke curling slowly up from the black end. "I was here when I was talking to him."

"No, I mean--I heard you while he was talking to you. Sam, right?" Steve pulls off the dusty baseball cap he's been wearing all this time, running a hand through his hair. "I'm the reason he had to go."

Dean looks at him. There's no recognition on his face as his eyes flick across Steve's, up through his hair and back again. "What, you in school with him or something?"

"I'm--" How does one introduce oneself as Captain America? "Steve Rogers."

Dean just stares at him blankly, and aggressively, for a minute longer. Then realization filters into his features. "What?"

Steve doesn't say anything, just looks back at him uncertainly, waiting. A progression of expressions crawl onto and off of Dean's face until one settles there, a little cocky, a little wild, like the grin Bucky would get when he was holding up his fists against someone too big to beat, someone who was going to leave them bloody. "Shit," he says. "I invited Captain America to fuck me."

Steve winces before he can catch himself. Dean's eyes go hard, defensiveness turning to offense.

"Sorry," he says coolly. "Wouldn't'a done it if I'd known who you were."

"Dean," Steve begins, and Dean's eyes go even harder.

Steve squares his shoulders under his jacket. "Maybe I should go."

"Maybe," Dean says, not moving from the bed. His eyes don't move from Steve, either. They watch Steve pick up the cupcakes, yet again, and set them on the corner of Dean's bed, and walk to the door.

Steve hesitates with his hand on the door knob. Then he thinks better of it, and turns the knob, and lets himself outside, and closes the door gently behind him.

 

It takes about twenty minutes to find the bar again, and his bike. And it's stupid, it's really stupid, and probably even inconsiderate, but he finds a twenty-four hour store with an assortment of cakes in its huge refrigerators and he buys one. There's no one at the bakery to write a message on it in colored icing, but Steve finds his way back to the motel anyway, balancing the box awkwardly between his knees and licking salt from his lips in the night wind as he remembers the year Bucky found chocolate for his birthday, that miserable July night on the front, when it was so hot that they had to scrape the melted sweetness of it from the wrapper with their teeth.

When he gets back to the motel, though, the black car is gone. Room 12 is empty.

 

Two months later, Steve is sitting a café a few blocks from Peggy's nursing home. It's March, still cold enough to need a jacket, and he's in a sleek brown leather one with a lined interior, that makes him think every morning as he slides his arms inside it of what he and Bucky would have given back in Brooklyn to have clothing as warm as this. He studies the swirl of cream inside his coffee cup without drinking it. He doesn't drink his coffee with cream, or even much sugar, but his sketchbook is on the table next to his hand, and he'd thought the swirl of white inside black-brown might be something to pick up his pencil for.

The metal chair on the other side of the table screeches across the paving. Steve looks up to see Stark flopping down into it, dark sunglasses on his face.

He tosses a slim phone onto the table. "Picked a hard guy to find, Rogers."

Steve looks at the phone, then up at Stark. Reaches for it. "You found…?"

Stark snorts. "Of course I did." He motions at the waitress coming out of the café; points at Steve's cup and holds up two fingers with a grin. "What, you think I couldn't track down some hick civilian?"

Steve drags his thumb slowly across the phone's screen, in the careful deliberate way he's learned to do. The contact storage is open; there's only one entry in it, a name _Dean Winchester_ and a long, long list of numbers.

"Not sure which of 'em are in service," Stark says. "He gets around, your boy." He's watching Steve from over the top of his sunglasses. Steve stiffens against the question he senses coming, but Stark just says, "There's a P.O. box, at the bottom."

He hops up out of his chair when the waitress comes out with his steaming coffee. Drains it in one gulp, going "ack!" at the heat and plops it back down on the table next to Steve's. "Thanks for the coffee, big guy. Ring me up the next time you need help stalking someone."

Steve flushes but doesn't put the phone down. As Stark disappears back into his chauffeured car idling at the curb, he runs his thumb down the edge of the plastic and lifts his spoon to stir the cream into his coffee.

 

It takes him a long time to decide what to send. Eventually, he finds a recording of the speech Sam Winchester gave at the event Steve spoke at, the one that was as much about equalizing access to healthcare as it was about introducing Captain America. Sam spoke about the Christmas he spent in the hospital with his brother because the bronchitis they hadn't been able to afford to see a doctor for had turned into septic pneumonia. It's on Youtube, the five-minute speech, Sam's voice distant and occasionally quavering nervously as he pauses to take breaths, the sound quality somewhat poor but the words intelligible. Steve spends three hours poring over an internet tutorial to figure out how to download the video into a sound-only format, and another two hours and a visit to a Radio Shack with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes obtaining a cassette like the one that had been protruding from Dean's car radio and figuring out how to record the sound onto it.

When he puts the cassette in a blue post box on the corner, his D.C. address is on the return label. He writes _S.G. Rogers_ neatly above it.

 

He's not sure what to expect. He tries not to expect anything. That gets easier as a month passes, and then another. Then he comes back to his apartment from a mission in the Pacific, his hair still smelling of salt water, and stops tiredly, mechanically, at his mailbox downstairs, expecting the building newsletter and nothing else.

A small card comes out with the bigger yellow paper of the June newsletter, though. GREETINGS FROM AMERICA'S MAIN STREET! U.S. 66 in SCENIC MISSOURI it says in big letters filled with picket fences and a winding road shaded with curving oak trees.

There's a big white crease down the middle, like it was folded and put in someone's pocket, and when Steve turns it over, there's a small dark blotch on the back that could be old blood or old barbecue sauce.

There's just one word, in a dark, deliberate print. **_Thanks_** _._

Steve turns the postcard back over. Runs his thumb across the white crease cracking the road in two.

 

He can still remember Camp Lehigh, sitting in his bunk with a pencil as Hodge and the others talked about pin-up girls and chewing his lip over letters to Bucky; what to say, and what not to. He hadn't ended up sending any during Basic, in the end. And then he hadn't on the USO circuit, either, too full with the sick pit of shame in his stomach, not wanting to tell Bucky what he'd done and how he'd screwed up, and at the same time wanting so badly to do exactly that. But Bucky was doing _real_ things, holding guns and not note cards; and now that he had a body, now that he could (should) take care of himself, just couldn't once Steve let Bucky focus on Bucky, instead of worrying about Steve?

So he didn't. He never sent one letter. Not one.

 

The box for the fancy coffee machine Stark sent as a "housewarming gift to thaw the Capsicle" is still in the bottom cabinet in the kitchen. Steve digs it out and lines it carefully with newspaper. He never saw a care package while he was on the front, but at the grocery stores here he's seen flyers asking for donations, has taken careful pictures of the list of wanted items with his cellular phone and studied them as he goes up and down the grocery aisles, filling his cart. Gray Hanes socks and razors and Werther's candies, dropped off at the VA to be packaged into shoe boxes to go Over There. It's not much, it was never much, but it's something, and today, Steve stops at the check-out line with his pulled-down cap and his basket of socks and hot chocolate packets.

He eyes the display of cinnamon gum beside the conveyor belt, then puts the whole box in his cart.

At his apartment, he tapes the coffee box shut carefully with silver duct tape that gleams like gunmetal. Then he walks down to the post office.

 

Another three weeks pass. Two missions and two debriefings, nights spent sweating on the rooftop even though he's shivering, his teeth chattering in his jaw.

Then one day he opens the dull brass mailbox and a postcard falls out.

This one doesn't have anything written on it. Just the address it was sent from, the cursive sloppy enough to be illegible.

Steve weighs it in his gloved hand. Then he gets changed out of his gear and heads back down the stairs out onto the street.

 

It becomes a cycle between them. Steve sends small packages, and Dean sends back blank post cards that eventually have words. **_Thanks for the socks_** and **_You know I'm not a soldier, right?_** and **_Why are you doing this_** and **_Stop_**.

So Steve does. He sits down at his kitchen table, still in his dust-covered, scorched suit, and thumbs the corner of the postcard with its cartoonish renditions of lobsters dancing in aprons around a pot.

He puts it and the phone from Stark in the drawer under the coffee machine, behind the shiny, unused cutlery. He feels guilty. He feels lonely. He feels tired.

 

Three more weeks. Two more missions.

Then:

A creased, smudged envelope with a familiar return address. A foil-wrapped stick of gum inside it and with it, an empty foil wrapper with words scrawled inside it in black ink.

_you got me hooked on Big Red_

Steve digs his forehead into his palm and bites a smile into his lip.

 

After that, he doesn't send things. Just letters. Not even letters, really, but little sketches. The salt shaker on his table, a cup of coffee on a café counter, the skyline through his window. Always a stick of gum with it, and Dean always sends one back, sometimes stiff and stale with age; sometimes mint or orange or strange, fruity flavors if he couldn't find Big Red wherever he was. Steve discovers Fruit Stripes and sends them to Dean with zebras drawn on the outside of the wrappers; Dean sends them back folded into little origami animals that fall out of the envelope like stars when Steve opens it and shakes them out onto the table.

Sometimes they smell like whiskey. Sometimes they're stiff and brown with blood.

 

Then it's Christmas. Or nearly Christmas, and Steve sits in the back of the quinjet trying to decide whether to send something, whether it would be inappropriate. He is wondering, too, whether to ask about calling, or what Dean's doing for the holiday; is trying to avoid thinking about what _he_ will do for it.

His last Christmas was on the front with Bucky and the Commandos, cold coffee and colder sleeping rolls, shoulder to shoulder after a hike through the Ardennes toward a French collabo camp. The tip of Bucky's nose was red and chapped with cold; he kept rubbing his sleeve across it and Steve kept slapping it away, telling him to quit rubbing, the way Bucky had always told him to, back in Brooklyn; and Bucky grinned at him in shared, secret memory. It was a good grin, a warm one, the kind that warmed Steve's insides like a shot of something sweet. Then Falsworth pulled out the liquor he'd been hoarding for the occasion, and Bucky's grin became a distant thing, smudging at the corner, bleary eyes staring into the campfire at something Steve couldn't see.

He digs his cheek into his knuckles and continues to draw his doodle for Dean, of a Christmas tree tied to the top of his sleek black car. He draws until Rumlow calls two klicks from the drop zone, and then he tucks it into his breast pocket and pulls his helmet on.

 

No response to his Christmas card.

Perhaps Dean isn't Christian, Steve thinks. Perhaps he doesn't celebrate Christmas; perhaps Steve was extremely presumptuous and inconsiderate and now Dean doesn't wish to speak to him.

He sends, _I'm sorry. I didn't mean to offend you_. A whole package of gum with it, and he stands in line at the post office to send it certified mail, feeling guilty and ridiculous all at once.

He wishes letters didn't take so long. He wishes he didn't have only Dean's PO box address. He wishes he knew how often Dean checked it.

(He wonders, not for the first time, why Dean moves around so much, why he doesn't stay in one place, why--)

Still nothing. Another mission. Nothing. A mailbox with a newsletter and an advertisement for a new pizza delivery place, and.

More thoughts. Does Dean have enough food. Is he safe. Is he behind a bar somewhere in the snow, beaten up by someone he tried to hustle like at that bar when they met.

An itch under his skin. A panic. A thumb grazing over his cell phone screen, over and over. Calls to numbers that don't pick up. _This is Dean's other, other cell--_

_The number you are trying to reach is no longer in service--_

_This wireless customer is not available at this time--_

_This is John Winchester. If you need help, call my son, Dean--_

Steve pulls the phone from his ear.

 

Stark's phone goes straight to voicemail, too. Steve has barely put his own down, though, before it's ringing.

He presses the green accept call button. "You said if I needed help--"

"Captain Rogers?" says JARVIS's voice. "Mr. Stark is indisposed at the moment. May I be of assistance?"

"I need-- The person he tracked down before," Steve says. "Dean Winchester. Could you try to track him down now?"

"Of course, Captain. I will contact you as soon as information is available."

The call disconnects. Steve paces, and runs his thumb over his phone, and then sits back down. He scrolls down his contact list until he finds the number he programmed into it what feels like a very long time ago.

On the third ring, a breathless voice answers, "Hello?"

"Sam?" Steve says uncertainly. "Sam Winchester?"

"Yes…?" Sam says. "May I ask who this is?"

"This is Steve. Steve Rogers."

An intake of breath. "Captain Rogers! Hi! I mean--hello! How can--Can I help you?"

It comes out in a rush. "I'm looking for your brother, Sam. Have you heard from him?"

Sam's end of the line is silent. Steve senses the dread in it.

"He's not--" An exhalation. "Shit. I'm really sorry, Captain Rogers. Whatever he did--"

"He didn't do anything," Steve says, baffled. "I just--have you heard from him?"

Another silence. When Sam speaks next, there is suspicion in his voice. "Captain, what do you want with my brother?"

"I'm acquainted with him," Steve says. "We've been--corresponding."

The suspicion is thicker. "About what?"

"Is he all right?" Steve says instead of answering. "He doesn't have to write back to me. I just want to make sure he's all right."

"Why wouldn't he be?" An edge of fear to the suspicion now, and of combativeness.

Steve hesitates. It strikes him for the first time that perhaps Sam doesn't know about the blood or the whiskey either, the things that soak the things that Dean has touched, that have touched him.

"Captain Rogers," Sam says, and his voice is somehow pitying, "do you know what my brother does?"

Steve doesn't say anything for a long moment. Because Dean has never offered, and Steve has respected that; learned long ago how to respect another's silence, from the time that he didn't; the time he refused to let Bucky keep his secrets about what he did to make sure they had heat in winter and food in lean times. The look of panic and terror on Bucky's face, the shame cold and sticky between them afterward.

"Sam," he says, his voice Captain America's, "that's not what I asked."

Sam lets out a laugh. It's wild and discordant and angry. "You don't," he says, and there's confidence in it, dismissive and vicious. "God, what are you even looking for him for, then?"

"I told you," Steve says stiffly. "We've been writing."

"Since _when_."

"Since his birthday," Steve says. "After I left your school, last year." And then, because he feels uncharacteristically angry: "He came to celebrate his birthday with you."

Silence. Breathing on the other end of the phone.

"I haven't talked to him since July," Sam says finally.

Steve blinks. "What?"

"We're not exactly the Cleavers, Captain Rogers. Or the--whatever a well-adjusted family was, back in your day."

Steve is still trying to understand. "You haven't talked to Dean in _six months_?"

"You wanna curb the judgment?" Sam says. "It's not actually easy, having a family."

"I know it's not," Steve says, biting down on his angry _it's better than the alternative_. "If you haven't spoken to Dean since summer, who else does he check in with? Who makes sure he's alive?"

"He's _fine_ ," Sam says, sounding bewildered. "Our dad wouldn't let anything happen to him, Captain--"

"He and your father are separated."

"What?"

"Your father's voicemail," Steve says. "It says to call Dean. But Dean isn't answering."

Sam's side of the line goes dead. Steve lowers his phone from his ear, looking at the blinking red _disconnected_ message, and attempts to dial him again. He tries twice, with no answer aside from Sam's cheerful voicemail greeting.

Just as he's lowering the phone the second time, the screen lights up with Sam's number.

"He's not answering the numbers I have for him," Sam says.

"I know," Steve says tersely, because he _just told Sam that._

"I'm going to see if I can turn on his GPS," Sam says. "In the meantime, call this guy. Bobby Singer." He reads off a phone number.

 

The voice that answers it is gruff. "The hell do you want?"

"I'm calling for Bobby Singer."

"Speakin'."

Steve relaxes marginally. "I was told to call you concerning Dean Winchester."

"By who?" Singer says suspiciously.

"His brother Sam," Steve says. "We're concerned about his whereabouts."

There's a sound like boots thumping heavily onto the floor. Then the barking of dogs. "Shit," the man mutters. It sounds like he's pouring something into a glass, the slosh of liquid and the thunk of glassware on wood. "Dammit, John."

"Do you have any information?"

"No," says the man shortly. "You said Sam's lookin'?"

"Yes."

"Gimme his number. Yours, too. The hell are you, anyway?"

"A friend," Steve says tersely. "When was the last time you spoke to him?

"When I was runnin' his daddy off my property with my rifle," Singer says. "Now get off the line so I can start lookin'. I'll call when I got somethin'."

 

JARVIS beats Singer. Steve's phone rings a few minutes after 2200, JARVIS' cool voice informing him that surveillance video outside a gas station in Rochester four days ago picked up someone matching Dean Winchester's facial schematics. "I've uploaded the footage to an online drive should you wish to access it for verification, sir."

"I trust you, JARVIS," Steve says. He's already pulling his things on, grabbing his keys and heading down the stairs three at a time. "Send me the coordinates."

 

Too much time to think on the drive through black night. His headlights make the darkness gritty, his breath fogging the cold visor of his helmet. His shield is a comforting weight, and it's too much like the like Zola's train, the blisteringly cold air cutting through every thread of his clothing, frost gathering on the edges of his gloves, the knees of his suit.

It feels like afterward, the numb disbelief, the cobweb he kept having to shake from himself each time: Bucky's going to laugh when--no

Bucky better not have eaten all the--

no

when Bucky sees--

He blinks and squints at the broken yellow lines burning away in front of him. Grips the handlebars tighter.

 

He checks his phone at his next stop for gasoline. There's three missed calls from  Singer; he presses one.

"You mighta mentioned," says the man when he picks up, "that you were Captain America."

Steve swipes his card through the reader. "It didn't come up."

"Here's what else didn't come up," Singer says. "Your kind fight aliens. Our kind fight the stuff that goes bump in the night."

Steve watches the gas meter climb. "I'm sorry," he says. "You're going to have to clarify that for me."

"They had _ghosts_ in your time, didn't they?" Singer says. "We hunt dead things. Or the things that should be."

"Ghosts," Steve says.

"Ghosts."

The pump thunks to a stop. Steve pulls it out of the tank. "All right."

Singer's quiet for a minute, maybe listening to Steve cap the gas tank and straddle the bike again. "You sure believed that awful quick."

"I woke up seventy years in the future to aliens attacking New York," Steve says. "Skepticism doesn't really pay in my line of work. You got any other information for me?"

"Vampires," Singer says after a minute. "Looks like Dean was huntin' a nest in Rochester."

"On his own," Steve says tonelessly.

Singer just grunts. "Slicin' off the head kills 'em," he says. "Or burnin' em to ash. Not much else."

Steve says, "Thanks" before hanging up.

(He pictures the corners of Dean's postcard stiff and dark with blood.)

 

There's a sketch of Dean in his left breast pocket that he did back in August, as guiltily and surreptitiously as he did anything that had to do with Dean. He planned to canvass with it, show it to people in town to ask if he's seen the boy-- _man_ in the drawing, but in the end, he doesn't have to. On the road into town he sees it, a gleam of black metal among trees, and he pulls over, bumping over uneven ground.

Dean's black Impala is parked carefully in the little copse of trees, snow covering its roof and hood. There's a fallen tree branch on the trunk that's dented the metal, and between that and the accumulation of snow, Steve doesn't want to hazard a guess at how long the car has been here like this.

There's not much of a trail leading away from the car, thanks to the snow, but there's a scent from the east, carried by the wind. It's a smell that used to make Steve sick his first few weeks touring the front before his serum-sensitized nose become desensitized to it, the smell of bodies rotting.

He follows the scent, dread churning in his guts. After about fifteen minutes, it bring him to a ramshackle barn, its wood dark with age. He hears no movement within it, but the smell of decomposition gets stronger as he gets closer.

He pulls his shield from its harness on his back, looping it over his left arm, and holds his breath as he eases the barn's large door open. It gives a long, loud creak, making him wince, but still there is no movement from within.

The smell is much stronger here, though still more muted than it would be if it wasn't winter. He has only a moment to appreciate that, though, before his eyes adjust to the dimness inside the barn.

It's a scene of carnage. The kind he hasn't seen since the 40s: dismembered bodies and, around them, desiccated ones, their eyes sunken and dark with dead flies. He brings his sleeve up over his nose, can feel himself breaking into a cold sweat, dizzying tunnel vision, and tries to work past it, breathe around it. It only brings more of the fetid scent in, thick on his tongue like soup, and he gags, squeezes his eyes shut.

He's not sure how long passes before he opens his eyes again. Just that he does, and makes himself look around. The desiccated bodies are all restrained somehow, ropes around their ankles and wrists. The decapitated ones look fairly well-nourished. Steve walks toward them one by one, matching the severed heads to the bodies, noting how three appear to have been decapitated by a blade, by clean cuts across their necks, but the fourth, furthest back in the darkness of the barn, still has his head connected to his neck, the skin ragged and torn by some sort of ligature. The greasy yellow bones of his spine are still intact.

Steve steps closer gingerly, lips compressing. He nudges the man's leg gently with his shoe.

The man's eyes snap open. Fangs sprout from his mouth with a hiss.

Steve slams his shield down. It bisects the man's head and neck so violently that the head rolls away, stopped only by a moldering bale of hay.

He has to get out after that. He stumbles through the back door, into the sun-bright dilapidated yard, and that's where he sees the puddle of sick with flies buzzing over it.

That's where he follows the flies to the crumpled body half-buried in snow behind a frost-rimed wheelbarrow.

 

Everything is cut off of Dean's body when they wheel him into the operating room. They bring it to Steve later, the blood-caked rags of his jeans, cut neatly by surgical scissors; the equally bloody shirt and flannel and only slightly bloodied leather coat; and last, the gray Hanes socks, untouched by the red that covers everything else. These all come in a clear plastic bag taped shut, and in another, smaller sleeve of plastic are Dean's personal effects: a thin battered wallet, two dead phones, a necklace with a brass pendant, a silver ring, two leather bracelets, and a stick of gum.

All of this Steve brings with him when they finally bring Dean out of the OR into a private room in the intensive care unit. Dean has a hole in his skull now, the neurosurgeon tells him, drilled there to relieve the pressure in his brain, and Steve nearly laughs, because they had stories of ghosts and vampires in his day, and stories about other planets and the things that might live there,  but they never had _this_ , drilling holes in people's heads to fix them.

When he goes into the room and sees Dean lying there on the bed, he wants to pull a cap over the sad bareness of Dean's skull where they've shaved it for the surgery. He wants to cover it with his hand to keep it warm.

There is already a white bandage wrapped around Dean's head, though, the sheet beneath it a terrible watery pink where there's still a monitor inside him to check the pressure inside his skull. Steve sits on the side opposite of it so he won't have to look, then steels himself and walks around to sit on the other side so that he does.

( _Sergeant. Three, two, five, five…)_

Steve sits, and waits for Dean to wake up.

 

When a nurse comes in to bathe Dean and take care of his catheter, Steve steps out. Only outside, in the dimmed lights of the hallway--it's night, he realizes distantly--does he remember the phone in his pocket. He pulls it out and sends a quick text to Stark and, then, to Sam.

Sam's reply is immediate. _how is he?_

 _Stable at the moment_ , Steve texts. _Can you get a plane ticket? I can arrange transport through a friend if not._

A long moment passes. Steve rubs his thumb against the screen of his phone and glances at the curtain concealing Dean's room from the hallway. He can hear the quick, efficient sounds of the nurse tearing open sterile supplies. Around him, the ICU smells equally of shit and disinfectant, with soft beeping noises coming from all the rooms. A few feet away, a thin old man moans and moves restlessly in a bed, an oxygen mask strapped over his face.

His phone vibrates. He looks back down.

_I have a final tmrrw. I'll come the day after that if he wants me._

Steve's lips compress again. _Sam, his condition is serious._

The pause is even longer this time. _we both made our choices._

A brief pause. Then another vibration:

 _please just ask him if he wants me to come thursday?_                                   

Steve's jaw jumps. He clenches the phone in his hand and stalks three strides down the hallway, then pivots and strides back. Stands there, arms crossing over his chest and chin coming down to dig into his collarbone as he stares hard at the floor.

The nurse comes out. "All good," she says softly, and he barely remembers to thank her before walking back around the curtain, sitting heavily down in the chair. Dean hasn't moved; there's the smell of antiseptic and urine in the air, and Steve crushes his knees beneath his fists. Sits for a long moment, feeling the bones grind, and then picks up his phone again.

Singer answers on the first ring. "Yeah?"

"Have you been able to get in touch with his father?"

Singer lets out a breath. In the room across the hall, the old man moans again.

"He needs someone here," Steve says.

"You're there."

Steve's heart goes even tighter and colder in his chest. He doesn't know how to explain to Singer that Dean doesn't really know him. He's been sending Dean pictures of coffee cups while he sits comfortably in his warm apartment, and Dean's been knife-fighting honest-to-God monsters in backwoods on his own; and everything is lopsided and misshapen and wrong. Dean needs someone he knows, someone he loves who loves him; he needs someone whose touch he knows even in the dark, and Steve's not that.

"He needs someone," he repeats, and hangs up.

 

He drifts into consciousness for a few seconds, the next night. The lights are all dimmed, even the ones at the nurse's station outside. There are monitors glowing softly around him. There are the reflections of monitors glowing in the dark windows on one side of the room. There is someone with hair the same color as his mom's sleeping in a chair next to his bed.

His hand is around Dean's.

Dean remembers _angels are watching over you_ before he slides back into sleep.

 

Dean wakes up several times. Not completely, for any of them, but Steve always presses the call button when it happens, hanging back uncertainly as a nurse strides quickly in and shines light into Dean's eyes, checks his pupils, the reading on the monitor with the wire leading from the pink-stained pillow. A doctor comes each morning, around five a.m. when the sky and the ward are still dark. Sometimes it is the dark-haired neurosurgeon who did the surgery and sometimes it is an older white-haired man who never speaks, just studies Dean from the foot of the bed with his hands in his white pockets like he can will him awake with the force of his stare alone.

The dark-haired surgeon tells Steve they won't know the extent of the damage until Dean wakes up all the way. _If_ he wakes up all the way. The doctor is careful about what he says, navigating around promises like a bomber pilot, swooping low and then high, and Steve digs his knuckles harder into his lips, the ridges of his teeth. Dean's on medication to keep him quiet right now, the doctor says; they're giving the brain time to rest and heal, and it's not a good thing for Dean to wake up right now; they don't want him to wake up yet.

Steve tries to accept this as okay, tries not to pace back and forth with his hands in his pockets as he keeps them from yanking the sedatives out of the IV and he knows with a sudden hysteria how Bucky must have felt all those times he lay curled up on the bed coughing until he turned purple, him unable to draw breath from the air and Bucky unable to give it.

 

\- - -

 

Dean wakes up a few days later. He's discharged a few days after that. He sits in the bed as a whole team of people in white coats and scrubs and ties talk about the need for follow-up with PT, and OT, and psychiatry and rehab and all the excellent centers they can put him in touch with, and Captain America  listens attentively, blue eyes intent and patient, while a red-haired woman beside him just keeps an eye on the doctors and Dean, her eyes razor-sharp. Dean still has a splitting headache despite the pain meds he's on, and he's only catching about every other word, between that and the general sense of fogginess he feels, because there's no way this is actually happening.

He has a vague memory of having tried to call his dad, on the hospital phone a nurse helped him dial out on. It's cobbled to a memory of someone's face looking sad and pissed at the same time, and the face is Captain America's, he thinks. Yeah. Captain America's. He snickers.

He must zone out again then, slipping back under the surface between the waves of pain, and when he resurfaces he's being helped gently into a wheelchair. The stupid weird stockings aren't on his feet anymore, and they feel naked without them even though somebody's pulled socks and a pair of slippers--fucking _slippers_ \--onto his feet. He nods off again once someone's wheeled him into the elevator--the Captain, it's the Captain's voice rumbling reassuringly behind him as he talks to the lady with the red hair who's leaning against the other wall of the elevator, and Dean considers his reflection in the polished silver doors, his reflection in the wheelchair with Captain America standing behind him, leaning over him, and he thinks he must be on some sort of trip, some sort of acid, he'd been thinking about doing something like that for his birthday, a little happy birthday to me, before the coordinates came from Dad.

More blurriness. A plush black car. Cap's voice: "Sshh, you're okay, we're just on the road." And blurriness again. Quiet, and dark.

 

The next thing he knows he's being coaxed awake, and his arms are over someone's really big shoulders. He's awake enough to realize that--damn fucking big shoulders jesus--and there's a mechanical voice saying something, and Dean says muzzily, "Cap?"

"Right here." The arm around his waist tightens.

"Where you takin' me?"

"New York," Cap says. "This is Avengers' Tower. A friend of mine got some things all set up for you here so we could get you out of the hospital."

Dean laughs. "Universal health care," he says, and begins to giggle.

 

Cap sets him down in some kinda bed. It's not a hospital bed but it's not a normal one, either, and he brings Dean a heavy glass of water and a little cup of pills. Dean pokes through them with his finger, making sure there's no roofies, and dutifully picks out the Percocet, sliding it into his pocket to save for their orange bottle stash for later, for when they really need it.

Cap catches his hand. Dean looks up, slack-mouthed, big-eyed, caught. They just stare at each other for a minute. Then Cap swallows. He looks sad again. He lets go out Dean's hand, though, and Dean puts the pill in his pocket and takes the rest and drinks the water and is asleep.

 

When he wakes up, his mouth takes like cotton and ass. He staggers upright and out of the room. It opens into a short hallway that opens into a wide-open kitchen with a stainless steel island in the middle. Captain America is there, looking uncaptain-like in gray sweat pants and a t-shirt.

"Fuck."

Cap looks up. His face is creased in concern; he sets down the box of instant pancakes in his hand and steps closer. "Dean?"

A laugh escapes him.

Cap looks even more concerned now, reaching out to cup Dean's elbow. "What is it?"

"Just." Another laugh. "Was kinda hoping the whole rescued by Captain America thing was a roofie dream."

Cap's forehead creases some more. And Dean laughs again, maybe a little more high-pitched this time. Captain America's been playing penpals with him. With _him_ , like--like--like in this one school he went to, there was a program where all the fifth graders read to first graders to teach them how to read, and sometimes the fifth graders gave the second graders cards or lollipops to congratulate them on reading so good, and Dean's the second grader to Cap's fifth grader except Cap's really, like, a high schooler and Dean had to repeat second grade and

Cap is grabbing him by the elbow. "Dean?" he says, and his voice is very distant. Dean blinks and realizes he's swaying. His face feels a little numb.

"Whoah," he hears himself say, also from far away.

"Water," Cap says decisively. He steers Dean to a chair and sets him down. Dean gets his head between his knees and waits for his stomach to land.

When it finally does, he forces his head up. Cap is crouched in front of him, one hand braced on his own knee. There's a little medicine cup of pills in it, and he has a glass of water next to his other knee on the floor. His expression is patient. Embarrassment crawls hot up the back of Dean's neck.

"Thanks," he mutters, taking the water.

Cap watches him swallow. It makes Dean self-conscious, and he swipes the back of his hand across his mouth.

"Have you ever had a concussion before?"

The question is a little stern, and it makes Dean bristle. "Only about five," he says sardonically. "Believe it or not, this ain't my first rodeo, Cap."

Cap's mouth thins out. He doesn't say anything, though, at least right now, his mouth wrinkling slightly on one side like he's tucking it away in his cheek for later, and Dean thinks _buddy, there is no later._ "I've been looking it up," he says instead. "It's not good to get too many of those."

"Occupational hazard," Dean says. "Sure you know about it. Line of duty and all."

Cap looks momentarily, fleetingly fierce. Then the look disappears into an impassive one, and he's standing up. "How's your stomach feel?"

Dean blinks, a little throw. He'd half expected a punch, maybe, or a cuff upside the head--or, more appropriately considering what Cap had just said about head injuries, maybe just some silent treatment. "A little nauseous, actually."

He studies Cap from the corner of his eye for a second, chewing on the corner of his lip. "They give you any of that--"

Cap heads over to the bag of medications on the counter. He pulls out one in an orange bottle and hands it to Dean. _Ondansetron_ , the label says, and Dean shakes one out. He sticks it under his tongue and draws his legs up onto the chair to put his head between his knees again. He notices as he stares at his feet that he's wearing a fresh pair of the gray Hanes socks Cap sent in all of his care packages.

"So, what?" he says around the tab dissolving under his tongue. He wiggles his toes. "You have an endless supply of these things?"

Cap's still for a minute before he pulls the lid off a pot on the stove. "I thought it might help to have something familiar."

Dean wiggles his toes again, looking down at them. He reaches up, elbow braced on his upraised knee, and runs his hand across the sutures in his scalp. They feel ugly and spiky, the tough suture that doesn't get absorbed. "When can I get these out?"

"Few more days."

The smell of something warm and salty wafts from the pan on the stove. It doesn't _quite_ make Dean's stomach turn, and his mouth starts to make saliva, warm on his tongue. Under his fingers, the suture feels weirdly centralized, knotted, not like the rows he's had for lacerations before. And his head feels soft, beneath the knots.

"What'd they do?"

Cap sets two steaming bowls on the table and sits down kitty-corner from Dean. The corners of his mouth are turned down. "They said they bored a hole."

Dean fingers the soft spot for a moment more before the words sink all the way in. Then he pulls them away, splaying his hand on his kneecap instead.

"Eat," Cap says softly.

Dean picks up his spoon. He waits until Cap's swallowed down a few mouthfuls himself before spooning up some of the nearly clear broth with its floating bits of vegetable and puts it in his mouth. When it touches his tongue more hot saliva springs up, and he works his mouth for a minute before swallowing.

"Sorry it's so boring," Cap says into the quiet. "The nutritionist said bland stuff for a while until your pancreatic enzymes go down."

Dean vaguely remembers something like this, one of the white-coated people saying that the TPN and sedatives had done a number on his pancreas. He doesn't really care. He's more concerned with what's only just now occurring to him, his brain clear enough for the first time since he woke up to realize--

"Where did you find me?"

Cap sets his spoon down. It gives off the air of starting A Conversation, and Dean tenses. Lots of memories of his dad setting down his gun oil and his disassembled Beretta, or Taurus, or Colt.

"Behind a barn," he says. "Out in the country."

"Some jackasses jumped me," Dean says. "While I was on the side of the road taking a leak. I'm just zipping up, and all of a sudden--they got me over the head with a shovel. I--I got them good, though, before they got me." He grins, nervous and fierce and ferocious. Fingering the wound on his head.

Cap studies him for a minute. Then he lifts his hand and pulls Dean's away from the sutures. He holds it under his own on the tabletop.

"So," he says. "Vampires, huh?"

Dean freezes.

"I talked to Bobby Singer," Cap says. "And your brother."

Dean can feel himself going colder, and looser. "Sammy, huh." A laugh escapes him, a little nervous and a lot self-deprecating. "Hope you didn't drag him into this."

"I dragged everyone I know into this," Cap says. "You were missing, Dean."

Dean shrugs, licking his lips. His eyes slide toward the wall.

"You were missing," Cap repeats. "And _no one was looking for you._ "

Dean shrugs again. He can feel his lip trembling, though. He rubs his free hand over his scalp, the sutures. Flattens his palm over it. Like he's trying to trap something inside.

Cap's voice is sharp and quiet all at once. "Doesn't that bother you?"

Dean huffs a laugh. He starts to flash a smile; then, when he meets Cap's unsmiling face, it fades.

"Course it does," he says quietly. Cap looks startled, then stricken.

They finish eating in silence.

 

Cap insists on doing the dishes. Dean thinks, stabbingly, incongruously, of the postcard tucked under the Impala's visor with the mug of coffee sketched on its back, the careful shading of the handle and the tiny crack at its lip. He stays sitting at the table, and then he gets up and goes back to the room he woke up in, aware the entire way of Cap's eyes on his back.

His phone sits on the nightside table there, plugged into a charger. He's not sure how he missed it before.

There are no missed calls from his dad. There are several from Bobby Singer, and several from Sam, and quite a few from unidentified numbers with New York, California, and D.C. area codes. He studies them for a minute, fingers stroking unconsciously at the sutures in his scalp, before he thumbs Sam's number and sits down on the edge of the bed.

Sam answers on the fourth ring. "--Dean?!"

A smile breaks onto his face despite himself. "Heya, Sammy."

"Oh my God." Sam's voice is all high and funny, the way it gets when he's really excited or really upset. "You _jerk_. Are you okay?"

"What're you talkin' about?" Dean flashes a smile before remembering Sam's not there to see it. "Of course I'm okay."

"Of course you are." There's the snide Sammy tone he's used to. "It's not like Captain America called me saying you had major _brain_ surgery after taking on a _whole vampire nest_ \--"

Dean smiles to himself. "You're gonna give yourself a hernia with all those italics, Sammy."

Sam makes a frustrated Chewbacca sound. "Damn it, Dean. Do you even--"

"I know," Dean says quickly. Before it can become a fight. "I know, Sammy. I didn't realize it was gonna be a whole nest, okay? I really didn't."

Sam huffs. Then, after a long moment, he says, "So. You and Captain America met _how_ \--?"

Dean winces. "I really don't wanna talk about it."

He can practically see the bitch face Sam is giving him. But finally Sam just huffs out a breath that crackles over the phone line. "Fine." Then: "Dean. I'm glad you're okay."

"Hey," Dean says. "It'd take more than some mangy vamps to take me down." He hesitates a minute, lip rolling beneath his teeth. "Thought it'd take more than that to get you talking to me again, too."

Sam sucks in a breath. "Dean--"

"Never mind," Dean says. "Sorry. Forget I said it."

But Sam never lets anything go. How could he forget that? "Dean, if I'd known Dad sent you on your own--"

"Nah," Dean says. "This is why you left." He exhales, a little. "I don't want you living like this, Sammy."

Sam says, "Then why do you want you living like that?"

There's a combative note in his voice, the kind that means he's about to launch into an argument. Dean closes his eyes.

"Please can we not have this fight," he says. "I'm tired, Sammy."

A silence. Then Sam sighs loudly.

"Do you need me to come," he says.

Dean closes his eyes. "No. No, I'm okay. Cap said you had finals--you focus on those."

"Okay." Sam doesn't sound completely convinced, but he doesn't argue. "You should call Bobby so he knows you're up. He was the one who talked to Captain Rogers."

Dean bites his lip, pressing his palms into his eyes. "Would you call him?"

Sam hesitates. "Yeah." Then, "You sure you're okay?"

"Tired," Dean says. "Just real tired, Sammy."

His voice breaks. He scrubs a fist across his mouth and says "g'night" and hangs up. He looks at his phone for another second longer, holding the glowing screen in his hand, until the screen dims, then, thirty seconds later, goes out altogether.

He curls up on his side on the bed. Brings his knees up to his chest until he can hook his thumbs under the cuffs of the dumb gray socks and fall asleep.

 

\- - -

 

Steve pauses in front of Dean's doorway about twenty minutes after he finishes talking to Sam. He can't hear anything from inside; he knocks quietly on the door jamb. There's no answer, and he eases the door open slightly, just enough to make out the shape Dean makes on top of the covers, the shiver of his shoulders.

Steve walks silently inside and puts a fresh glass of water on the nightstand. He puts another of the anti-emetic tablets there, too, and the pain medication. He touches Dean's head, just once. The shorn softness of his hair and the coldness of his skin, layered with goosebumps, beneath it.

Steve pulls the blankets gently from under him and tucks them over Dean's shoulders, snug around his chin. Then he slips back into the hallway and to his own room.

 

\- - -

 

Dean wakes just before dawn. It's still dark, the apartment silent and still. He gets up and gets dressed in the clothes folded neatly on the dresser. His duffel bag from the top compartment of the Impala's trunk is on the floor at the foot of his bed; he tucks the sweat pants and t-shirt he was wearing into it, then peels off the gray socks. He looks at them a minute before folding them over one another and setting them on top of the dresser.

There's an elevator set into one wall of the kitchen-slash-dining area. He noticed it last night and goes there now, pressing the down button as he looks nervously around him in the dim apartment for any sign of Captain America coming out of one of the closed doorways.

 

 

 

The elevator arrives silently, doors sliding open without a sound. Dean steps inside, blinking in the fluorescent lighting inside, and presses the MAIN button.

When the doors open again, it's not to a lobby. Instead, it's what looks like a whole-floor living room with  coffee tables and enough armchairs and couches for an army and, on the opposite side from the elevator, a marble counter and a stainless steel fridge that is being closed by a man with an Arc reactor glowing through his shirt.

Tony Stark turns around fully, eyes meeting Dean's over his glass of milk. "Ah." He takes a swallow and smack his lips. "What's this? A fuck and run?"

Dean flushes. "I didn't fuck--"

Stark's already waving a dismissive hand. "Whatever," he says. "Kind of ungrateful, but whatever."

Dean's still for a minute. Iron Man's sort of his idol, and it hurts to be taken down this way by him, but when has he ever met anyone's expectations. He shrugs, and hikes his bag more thoroughly over his shoulders, and stabs the down button again.

This time, the elevator takes him all the way down.

 

The envelopes nearly spill out of his P.O. box, when he finally goes to check it two months later. His hair's started to grow back in around the puckered wound where the sutures were, and his dad hadn't even noticed, when they met up in Minocqua for Dean to give him the new credit cards. Dean runs his hand over it unconsciously as he bends to the floor of the post office to pick up the scattered envelopes, sorting them into credit card applications and junk coupons and everything else.

Everything else is mostly old, old letters from Steve--from November and December and January before his birthday.

There's a notice for a package. The delivery is dated twenty-seven days ago. Dean holds it in his hand for a minute, and then he tucks it inside his fingers and walks inside to join the line winding up to the counter.

The woman who takes his package notice laughs when she sees it. "Just in time," she says. "Two more days and we woulda sent it back."

Dean kneads his knuckles against the hard counter as she goes to get it. Maybe he should let them send it back. Maybe he shouldn't even open it.

But his back hurts. His ribs hurt, too; he's pretty sure he cracked a few taking down this last poltergeist, because it hurts when he takes too deep of breaths. He's trying not to breathe too deeply, or move too quickly, and he hasn't spoken to anyone but diner waitresses and gas station cashiers in over a week. He feels like a drifting thing, like a ghost. Like iron would go right through him, part him like smoke, and when he was gone there would be nothing left to show he'd ever been there at all.

When the worker comes back with the box, he hugs it to him. He carries it over to the counter next to the Outgoing Mail slots and sets it down, holds his breath gingerly as he bends to pull the knife from inside his boot. Straightens up and slices through the silver tape holding the box shut.

A postcard flutters out.

 

Steve is studying a crossword puzzle at his kitchen table when the buzzer rings.

He looks up, because no one ever buzzes his apartment. No one has ever come to his apartment, and he does not order in. Prefers to go out when he doesn't feel like cooking, prefers to walk among the people outside and gulp down the moments of _not alone_ , gulp them down like a drowning man.

He stands up. There is a handgun under his sink, and he pulls it out, checking the safety, and slides it into the back of his trouser. Pulls on his coat and jogs down the stairs.

The lobby is empty except for someone standing in front of the mailboxes, pushing something into one of the brass boxes.

"Excuse me," Steve says. "Did you--"

The man turns. He's in a different jacket, not the over-sized one of before, but Steve still doesn't know how he missed the slightly bowed legs, the familiarly curved ears. "Dean."

Dean pushes his hands into his pockets. His hair has grown out; it's a little longer than Steve remembers, and a little darker, not quite brown, ungelled and tufted up in the front. "Heya, Cap."

"Hey." Steve steps forward before he catches himself. "Are you--?"

"Got your package." Dean joggles the familiar shoebox under his arm. He takes a step forward, almost reluctantly. His eyes are guarded, hesitant on Steve's. The shadow of a bruise extends from beneath his collar, circumferential like a noose.

Steve touches it gently. His eyes flick from it back up to Dean's.

"You okay?"

"Yeah," Dean says distractedly. "Poltergeist."

Steve nods. Dean licks his lips, once. His eyes flick down, then back up to Steve's. "You…"

"May I see?" Steve says.

Dean looks confused for a minute. Then he lets Steve take the box from him.

Steve opens it. Inside are the Styrofoam packing peanuts he poured inside, and the neatly folded pair of gray socks. And on top of them, the postcard that says **WISH YOU WERE HERE**.

He slides it out. He tucks the box shut again and hands the postcard to Dean.

Dean looks down at it. His fingers twitch against the edges.

Steve touches the side of his head gently. Where the sutures were, where the hole in Dean is. He touches his fingers gently over it, and leans in, and presses a soft kiss to Dean's mouth.

Dean exhales. Then he parts his lips, opening his mouth.

When Steve licks in, gentle, he tastes like cinnamon.

 

 

 

 


End file.
